Are applications developed exclusively inside
organisations or are outsourcing software development services used?

We develop all our applications inside our organisation

45%

We share development between internal and outsourcing

38%

All our software development is outsourced

6%

We provide software development outsourcing services

10%

We do not use custom-made applications

1%

Participants: 346

Ending date: February 2007

During the complete duration of this poll, there was a close equality between
the number of respondents that were not using outsourcing and those who use it,
partially or completely. Complete outsourcing is done by only a small fraction
of participants. There is a need to keep internal software development expertise
when outsourcing is used. Only 10% of the participants provide outsourcing
services. Around 20% of Methods & Tools readers are located in India, a
primary provider of outsourcing services.

The phenomenon of complete outsourcing of IT services is well known. An
article of McKinsey Quarterly estimated the global market for IT and business
process outsourcing to $30 billion. The part of software development in this
growing market is less known and discussed. In another recent survey published
by the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) (and developed
with an outsourcing company ;o]), 60% of the participants were offshoring
software development efforts and half of them were doing it with external
providers.

Cost was the primary driver for this activity for 84% of the respondents of
the SIAA survey and 57% have significantly increased offshore work in the past
18 months. The main factor for avoiding offshoring is loss of control for 91% of
the participants. In this survey, two-third of companies who work offshore claim
that the quality of work is above average when compared with onshore staff, with
25% rating the quality as "excellent" or "outstanding".
Organisations looking for external software development services often mention
the lack of available internal skills as a motivation, but this could be
considered more as a "politically correct" motivation. The growing
global need for software can allow people to develop software around the world,
but for each individual who sees its job "moved" to another country,
it is a difficult situation. Therefore, there is the feeling that there is a
competition for the same job.

In the many articles published on outsourcing, you read that this is a
growing trend, but when you look at surveys performed since 2003, the
percentages of outsourcing doesn't seem to have varied dramatically.

Outsourcing is often closely related to offshoring in software development,
but you can outsource onshore and you can create offshore subsidiaries. This
seems to be the current trend for large occidental organisation that want to
profit for lower-cost countries like India, but maintain a high control on the
process. However, for developers in Europe or North America, they feel no
differences if their Asian "competitor" work for a subsidiary or for
another organisation.